Fashion follows Oscar

By Michael Quintanilla

Updated 5:35 pm, Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Photo: The Help

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This dress is from the 2012 spring/summer ready-to-wear Dolce & Gabbana collection, which featured prints, many in florals and is reminiscent of an updated 1960s look that was seen in the Oscar nominated film The Help.

This dress is from the 2012 spring/summer ready-to-wear Dolce & Gabbana collection, which featured prints, many in florals and is reminiscent of an updated 1960s look that was seen in the Oscar nominated

This dress is from the 2012 spring/summer ready-to-wear Dolce & Gabbana collection, which featured prints, many in florals and is reminiscent of an updated 1960s look that was seen in the Oscar nominated film The Help.

This dress is from the 2012 spring/summer ready-to-wear Dolce & Gabbana collection, which featured prints, many in florals and is reminiscent of an updated 1960s look that was seen in the Oscar nominated

This floral print dress from the ready to wear Spring Summer 2012 Blugirl collection is perfect for the bridge playing set seen The Help.

This floral print dress from the ready to wear Spring Summer 2012 Blugirl collection is perfect for the bridge playing set seen The Help.

Photo: The Help

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The Artist comes to life in Etro's 2012 spring/summer ready-to-wear collection.

The Artist comes to life in Etro's 2012 spring/summer ready-to-wear collection.

Photo: Xxxxxxx

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The Artist comes to life in Etro's 2012 spring/summer ready-to-wear collection.

The Artist comes to life in Etro's 2012 spring/summer ready-to-wear collection.

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Costumes designed by Mark Bridges for the film "The Artist" are displayed at the FIDM Art of Motion Picture Costume Design exhibit in Los Angeles, Tuesday, Feb. 14, 2012. Bridges is nominated for an Academy Award for costume design for his work on "The Artist". (AP Photo/Matt Sayles)

Costumes designed by Mark Bridges for the film "The Artist" are displayed at the FIDM Art of Motion Picture Costume Design exhibit in Los Angeles, Tuesday, Feb. 14, 2012. Bridges is nominated for an Academy

Sunday's Academy Awards will celebrate the best in film, including costumes that are dead ringers for spring fashions by Lauren, Gucci, Etro and other star designers offering 1920s flappers, 1960s floral dresses, wicked goth and movie-star bombshell glam. Their doppelgänger designs seem to be straight from The Artist, The Help, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and My Week With Marilyn

"It's a great juxtaposition to see how the clothes worn in movies are clothes women will be wearing very soon," said Nick Verreos, spokesman for the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandise. For the past 20 years the Los Angeles school has displayed costumes from Academy Award-nominated films. Nearly two dozen films are represented in this year's free exhibit that will be up through April.

"The shape of those fitted, late 1950s and early 1960s dresses from The Help are very in now," said Verreos, a former Project Runway contestant and designer of his own evening gown label, Nikolaki. "Then you look at The Artist and see that old Hollywood glamour with the fur wrap, the cloche hat and all those sequins, also in. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is all about a dark, moody couture punk look that also will appeal to other women."

"Everything has been done, so it's about re-creating and reinventing a look and making it relevant once more," he said. "That's the genius of top designers - and costumers as well."

Sophia Banks-Coloma, a film costumer who just wrapped the movie, Syrup, based on Max Barry's cult novel about a slacker with a million dollar idea, says designers look to art, books and most of all, film, for inspiration.

"I remember living in New York when the Jackie Kennedy exhibition happened, and right after that, Marc Jacobs came out with his 1960s collection that featured big buttons and portrait jackets," she said from Hollywood, where she is working on her next movie, I Lucifer

She says film is a major reference point for designers today. "They hear about them in advance or pick up on it in the zeitgeist, like a trend, something that is in the air."

Roseanne Morrison, fashion director at New York's Doneger Group, a trend forecasting firm that works with designers, fashion investors and major department stores, agrees that films are influential to style.

"It's a confluence of events where you see designers pick up on something and then the media, in this case, movies, are on the same wavelength. It's the influences swirling around and it's especially nice when all this comes together in a nice way for fashion," Morrison said.

"This interest in darkness is a distinctive shift for a generation that has been expecting a happy ending," she wrote in a recent report for clients about the trend and the fashion message that "plays on fear, death and destruction."

On a lighter note, the appeal of the 1920s will continue strong beyond this spring.

"We recently did a feature for our clients on the 1920s look for spring: a soft-colored palette that is very important, the drop waist and bugle beading," she said of the trend that evokes The Artist meets W.E. meets Downton Abbey

Of the latter, Morrison and others agree that the fashions seen on the PBS Masterpiece Classic series set in the 1910s are primed to be the next big thing for men and women.

It will do to fashion what Mad Men did with the whole '60s revival, she said.

Still to come this December is The Great Gatsby, yet another 1920s period movie that will have heroine Daisy Buchanan in drop-dead drop-torso dresses, languid trousers, brocade jackets and more flapper fringe - from the silver screen to your closet, perhaps.